No salvation for McG’s Terminator
By Phillip Sayblack
Monday, December 14, 2009
When he took the helm of ‘X-Men 3’, Brett Ratner single-handedly buried the X-men franchise. Joel Schumacher did the same to the Batman franchise in ‘Batman and Robin’ and ‘Batman Forever’. Now, director McG has done the same thing with the Terminator franchise in ‘Terminator Salvation’. The movie starts very abruptly, and fails to fully explain the plotline from there on. The only real backstory that audiences get in this movie comes when the human-like terminator, Marcus, reaches Cyberdyne. There is no mention of what happened between the end of ‘T3’, and the beginning of this movie, years later in 2018. That, along with a general lack of music to help set the mood throughout hindered this movie in a large way. There was music in the movie. But there was so little of it, that it made feeling any excitement next to impossible.
To his defense, at least the story makes fleeting references to John Connor’s mother Sarah, and even his father, who turns up in this movie, only in much younger form. McG uses Kyle tastefully, save for the very end of the movie, which sadly plods on almost as slowly as the rest of the movie. The scripting leaves audiences wondering if Kyle, or even Marcus, would do what they expected. These drawn out expectations only serve to make for a movie that is far too long, and at times somewhat over dramatized.
In his defense, there is one saving grace to ‘Terminator Salvation’. That saving grace is the general cinematography. Those who have seen the first three Terminator movies were shown a much darker, more ominous future than what is presented here. This time out, the movie kind of feels somewhat like Mad Max. The “badlands” type of feel gives audiences a more realistic feel than some overly dark war scene such as shown in ‘T2’. Sadly, though, that is about the only truly shining point to a bore of a movie. Hopefully, now that the rights to the franchise are being sold, another director will take the reigns of what could become a whole new chapter in this franchise, and give it new life.
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